Courts as Arenas of Political Contestation: Collective Actors, Legal Conflict, and Democracy under Strain

Political science has produced rich but partly separate research on judicial politics, social movements and legal mobilization, and democratization and backsliding. Yet legal conflicts arising from social movements cut across these fields, from abortion and climate litigation to migration and gender-rights disputes, and criminal prosecutions of protesters. Actors enter these conflicts from different positions: progressive movements may initiate litigation; right-wing groups pursue competing legal strategies; states and private actors can draw activists into proceedings through criminal law, administrative measures, or SLAPPs. As stakes rise, judges and courts face political pressure themselves. Research spans partially connected work on judicial politics and behavior; social movement and socio-legal scholarship on legal mobilization, cause lawyering, legal repression, criminalization, and SLAPPs; right-wing legal mobilization and human rights (mis)appropriation; and autocratic legalism and lawfare. Recent work bridges some of these divides, but comparison remains fragmented across procedural settings, actor positions, political orientations, and regime type. The workshop brings these research communities into dialogue because collective actors’ strategies and judicial responses cannot be understood in isolation: actors operate within procedural rules and unequal distributions of authority, while judges respond to the claims and conflicts before them. This perspective distinguishes setting-specific from recurring dynamics and assesses their consequences for mobilization, rights, judicial authority, and democracy. A 2026 ECPR panel opened this exchange. Supported by the Standing Groups on Law and Courts and Participation and Mobilisation, the workshop develops it into a comparative agenda, with a joint publication as a longer-term aim.

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1: How do collective actors develop legal and political strategies from different procedural positions?
2: How do procedural rules and power asymmetries structure interactions among actors?
3: How do legal and political strategies diffuse across ideological camps, jurisdictions, and regimes?
4: How do courts and judges respond to pressures on judicial independence and legitimacy?
5: How do these interactions affect collective action, rights, judicial authority, and democracy?

1: Studies of social movement, legal mobilization, litigation strategies, and cause lawyering
2: Research on criminalization, SLAPPs, lawfare, repression, or diffusion of litigation strategies
3: Studies of procedural rules, power asymmetries, or institutional design shaping interactions
4: Studies of right-wing legal mobilization and human-rights misappropriation
5: Research on judicial behaviour, professional identity, or individual judges under pressure
6: Studies of institutional safeguards, court administration, or judicial-independence reform
7: Studies comparing legal engagement across liberal, backsliding, and authoritarian settings
8: Work on consequences of strategic interactions for rights, authority, or democracy